Menu

Positive Masculinity

Apparently no one has bothered to let this poor sap (I don’t know who he is) know that the “Toxic” masculinity narrative has now been replaced with “masculinity is toxic“. I find it interesting that when it comes to the mainstream societal understandings of what masculinity once was and what it is now – or what the mainstream believes it should be now – much of these interpretations are based on fanciful, anachronistic, ideas of what contributed to our understanding of masculinity now. I’ve gone into my own definitions of what constitutes ‘conventional’ masculinity for men many times before so I won’t belabor it now, however, as the popular narrative changes I’ve noticed some very common presumptions that masculinity critics like to use and are repeated over and over.

The first of these, and the most common, is the deliberate misconception that a boy’s learning to be masculine never left the 1950-60s. In the wake of the Nikolas Cruz shooting this rationale surfaced quite a bit. It still is. The idea is that boys are born as these tender, delicate souls, all naturally ready to emote and sensate like precious little girls – that is until the nebulous evil ‘patriarchy’ gets ahold of them and batters them into “being tough”, not crying and told to stop being such pussies. This is the old anachronism that presupposes western society never left the ‘macho tough guy’ preconditioning of boys to raise them to be these future murderers, wife beaters and misogynists.

This is, of course, the “boys are broken” narrative I addressed in Good Humans. It’s kind of ironic when you think that this narrative would have us believe boys naturally wanting to be boys is a net social negative and it takes some strong intervention in their upbringing to turn them into good humans. So what is it? Are boys being their natural selves by wanting to be rambunctious, risk taking, shit-giving, masculine boys, or are they naturally these tender little emo-beings coming fresh out of the womb only to have their ‘genuine’ sensitive emotional souls crushed by “hyper-masculine” fathers, male teachers and school coaches. This is one of the more stupid, but deliberate, paradoxes the Village and the Feminine Imperative conveniently switch between as circumstances require yet one more anti-masculine response.

Lies for Boys

You can see this confusion in the above Tweet.

Our society teaches boys to “toughen up”.

Actually no, the feminine-primary social order that has been systematically feminizing boys into feminine-identifying men for the past 50 years does nothing of the kind. Since the mid-seventies the cultural narrative took a hard turn to the feminine-correct in raising boys into pacified ‘harmless’ men. We’re going on five generations of telling boys it is incumbent upon them to get in touch with their mythical feminine sides if they want to evolve beyond ‘traditional masculinity’. There is no ‘toughening’ being taught to boys in a female primary education system that teaches boys in a manner that presumes they are defective girls.

…which is okay, but not okay when “toughening up” also means suppressing feelings.

Feelings are perhaps the only thing boys are being taught to prioritize in their feminine-primary educations today. This fact deserves a bit of explanation here. Male and female humans process emotions differently. Women in particular process negative emotions in a much different way than men. Men tend to prioritize information through a filter of rational discernment first and then sort out how they feel about that information in an emotional context. Women are much the opposite; girls process information through an emotional filter first and then sort out what the information actually means to them (and after that, how it might affect others). If this sounds like the essays I’ve written about how men’s and women’s communications methods differ you’re not too far off. Men prioritize the content (information) of a conversation while women prioritize the context (the feels she gets) from a conversation. This is how our brains work, and when one method isn’t socially favored above the other both methods can be complementary to the other.

But in a feminine-primary social order this is not how things work. As I mentioned, for the past 50+ years our educational system has shifted to favor the learning methodologies of girls at the expense of boys. This ‘girls style’ teaching has been the standard for so long now that we largely take it for granted that it is the only correct style of teaching. Today, men account for less than 25% of all teachers in the United States. In the UK it’s 25% and n Canada only 17% of elementary school teachers are male. Teaching is a female dominated profession and especially for younger kids. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics only 2% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers, and 18% of elementary and middle-school teachers, are men. How do you think stats like these affect the learning methodologies applied to boys and girls?

Yet still this lie that boys are the victims of some overwhelming toxic masculinity in their upbringing is the first reflexive explanation we hear from women and feminized men when a kid commits a criminal act. Why?

Lies for Equalism

Because it sounds right. It sounds like it should be right. The presumption is that boys are, in fact, girls; or at least they should be a functional equivalent of girls when it comes to educations. Over the past 50 years the baseless presumptions of blank-slate egalitarian equalism has not only inserted its lies into our social consciousness, but also into our presumptions about educating kids. I’ll repeat, men and women are biologically and psychologically different and boys and girls are equally different. The ways they learn are distinct to their sex. Yet for the past 4 generations egalitarian equalism has convinced (mostly female) educators that boys and girls are functional equals and gender differences are learned rather than innate.

While equalism informs (mostly female) teachers that boys and girls are the same, the teaching methodology that works best for girls and women is the predominant one today and for the recent past generations. The only way to justify this method as the universal one is to presume that boys are the same as girls – just ‘defective’ girls that must be taught to quash their innate maleness. If boys and girls are presumed to be blank-slate equals then it must follow that boys are just as emotion-prioritizing and sensitive as any girl, and it is through a process of an imagined patreo-misogyny social conditioning that boys psychologically cover over their “true” natures – that of precious little (defective) girls. In essence the equalist belief is that all babies are born as little equal blank-slates, but the ideal template for those blank-slates is a female nature irrespective of the sex of the child.

When a boy’s real, masculine, inborn nature expresses itself the first thing it meets in this equalist-but-feminine-primary education is derision and shame. For as much as boys would be boys they are taught that they aren’t good for being so. They’re encouraged to self-repress, self-deprecate their gender and self-police their brothers. They’re taught that the correct way to think is to emote like girls because that’s correct for the template of a “good human”. Despite the female-centric teaching boys innate nature still find ways for boys to be boys and when this happens an egalitarian (feminine-primary) social order presume the ‘bad behavior’ must be the result of the influence of an evil patriarchy that truly hasn’t existed in the way they believe it does for 50 some odd years.

As I’ve detailed in past essays, society only sees fathers as tolerable and superfluous when it comes to raising boys. Single mothers are celebrated as super-human and in the equalist lie that would have us believe that women can not only ‘have it all’ but they can ‘do it all’ we rarely question the necessity of a masculine influence in a child’s life. We give it lip service and parrot back the need for a man to “step up and take responsibility as a parent”. The message to dads is always “do better”, because the pretense for fathers is that they are inherently irresponsible and ‘broken’ just like all boys are.

The Village might even concede that a father is some advantage to a child, but ultimately he’s superfluous – that is until that kid is involved in some kind of criminality. Then the questions become “Where was this kid’s father? Why wasn’t he around to teach this kid some discipline and respect for human life?” The children of single mothers are overwhelmingly more likely to be come involved in criminality, but we don’t look at her half-measure parenting as a possible cause. Remember, she’s a super-hero and blameless, so any blame for this kid’s acts fall on the shoulders of a weak or absent father. Then fathers are necessary. Then the kid needed to ‘toughen up’ and dad should’ve taught it to him. And all of this comes full circle and feeds into the idea of father’s inherent incompetence again.

I’ve written a lot about the lie of transvaluation and Vulnerability in the past, but this was really in terms of how women perceive men and require strength and dominance. Another aspect of masculinity that is encoded into women’s mental firmware is to seek out men with superior competency. A woman just is, a man must become is the first maxim of a man accepting his Burden of Performance. Part of this masculine competency involves strength, know-how and determination; all things that have been replaced with feminine-primary emotionalism and naval gazing for boys.

Men are expected to know how to do everything and what they do not know, what they are not competent in is one criteria of how they are judged by women. A lot of guys might think, “So the fuck what? I don’t base my self-worth on the opinions of women.” As well you shouldn’t, but it doesn’t change the truth that if you don’t know how to change a tire when you get flat, or you need another man who does know how to do it to change it for you, a woman sees you as less competent – and by extension less capable of providing her with the security she needs from a masculine ideal. Women evolved to see men as a Jack of all trades, master of some.

A man’s vulnerability (taught to him as a child by his female-primary teachers) most definitely affects his manliness. Vulnerability is, by definition, a weakness. It is a flaw in the design, a chink in the armor and vulnerabilities will be exploited by enemies and rivals to ensure that man fails while a stronger one succeeds in all things. This is Darwinism so simple that to question it seems illogical, but in our equalist utopia toughness and fragility find no contradiction; vulnerability and resilience are bed partners. Again, we must consider that this illogical balance can only exist in the female ‘good human’ template and the idea that everything is learned and nothing is innate about male and female humans. Promoting the idea that ‘vulnerability doesn’t affect manliness’ presumes that the person declaring it is in some way an authority on a manliness that has been already demonized and conditioned out of our boys today.

They hate the very idea that a boy might act in accordance with an inborn masculine proclivity. They hate the idea that a boy might learn to be tough and resilient at the expense of a vulnerability (weakness) because it contradicts the equalist belief set. They hate the idea that boys and girls have innately, biologically, different ways of dealing with emotions that don’t align with their belief in a blank-slate. To force them to accept this would be to force them to abandon deeply ego-invested beliefs that they themselves had conditioned into them by the same feminine-primary education.

Boys don’t naturally emote like girls, but when they refuse to align with the female-correct way of emoting we say that some patriarchal macho man, somewhere, in some movie, in some song, in some household taught that kid not to feel. He somehow learned that allowing his emotions to rule over him, to be vulnerable, to prioritize his feelings above his sense of rational self is what it actually is – a weakness that in our evolutionary past was far likelier to get him killed than to earn the praise of his equalist teachers.

Boys are simply not as emotional as girls – our brains did not evolve that way – but because we value the feminine above the masculine today we say this kid is doing it wrong. We say he learned to be an asshole from his macho dad or he learned to love firearms because of the latest rap song or a toxically masculine society that doesn’t exist. A kid like Nikolas Cruz was bound to happen in a world that teaches boys to prioritize feelings above rationality. He was taught like a defective girl. He never learned the masculine inspired discipline, determination and resiliency because all that conflicts with the lie that vulnerability is ever a strength. All that conflicts with his feminine-primary upbringing.

As such, these ‘defective girls’ are unequipped to handle the rejection of a girlfriend. The participation trophy generation, the one where everyone’s a winner and no one ever has to deal with defeat, never teaches these ‘defective girls’ what to do when they finally do taste a bitter defeat. They never learned how to come back from it because that would mean admitting that vulnerability and emotionalism (the female-correct way to handle it) are in fact weaknesses. So, predictably, a ‘defective girl’ like Nikolas Cruz does what any petulant teenage girl would – he has an emotional outburst. Only his outburst consists of gunning down 17 kids with an assault rifle.

The answer to incidents like this doesn’t lie in gun control or further feminization of boys. It lies in reimagining how we educate boys and how we see masculinity as a net positive that can deter exactly this kind of emotional outburst. If you truly want these shootings to stop it’s time we embrace real men teaching real toughness and resilience in our boys. It’s time we teach boys like they will become tough, strong, invulnerable young men we may need to provide future generations with a much needed security. And the time where we’ll need them is coming faster than anyone today really thinks.

When I was compiling the material I was going to use for my second book, Preventive Medicine, I chose to use the essay Vulnerability in the hopes that I might be able to dispel one of the more egregious fantasies about masculinity – that vulnerability is in some way a strength for men. At the time I was rebutting the Mark Manson claim that men’s vulnerability was a necessity in whatever it was he used to consider Game, or the idea that a lot of Purple Pill hacks like to cling to about men’s vulnerability being some foundation upon which a “healthy” relationship ought to be built on. This trope is pulled straight from the Oprah / Dr. Phill handbook and really the belief that a man’s vulnerability is in someway a strength is part of a Blue Pill conditioned belief set that young boys are taught from a very early age.

Go to any woman’s dating advice for men blog today and you’ll likely read some variation of it. It’s actually part of our pop-psychology social consciousness – transvaluation is a very common theme; reversing weakness with strength has been the order for feminizing men and masculinizing women since the Sexual Revolution. I can remember hearing this ‘advice’ since the late 80s on any number of daytime talk shows. Reading this pabulum coming from ‘dating coaches’ with any association to the Red Pill was enough for me to want to dispel the notion. That, and the need for men to get in touch with their Jungian feminine sides as a means to better identifying with women and thus eventually getting laid by all the women who supposedly swooned for vulnerable, sensitive and emotionally available men (also known as ‘Beta Orbiters’).

However, as I was editing that essay for inclusion in the book I realized that what I was considering wasn’t so much the transvaluation of vulnerability and strength, but the model upon which the Feminine Imperative would like to convince men is appropriate and best suited for women’s needs in a relationship. The provable fact that women’s Hypergamy predisposes them to being aroused by men who display the most opposite aspects to this vulnerability (Dark Triad traits for example) doesn’t seem to matter; vulnerability is only beneficial to women seeking comfort and security in a long term partner.

In that essay I outlined a few things about what masculinity has become in a post-Sexual Revolution female-primary social order:

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

Women who lack any living experience of the male condition have the calculated temerity to define for men what they should consider manhood – from a feminine-primary context. This is why men’s preconception of vulnerability being a sign of strength is fundamentally flawed. Their concept of vulnerability stems from a feminine pretext.

Masculinity and vulnerability are defined by a female-correct concept of what should best serve the Feminine Imperative. That feminine defined masculinity (tough-guy ridiculousness) feeds the need for defining vulnerability as a strength – roll over, show your belly and capitulate to that feminine definition of masculinity – and the cycle perpetuates itself.

I returned to this essay today because I think that over the past six months we’re seeing a strengthening push from the Feminine Imperative to clamp down on what we’re to believe should be an acceptable expression of masculinity. In essence the imperative (or the Village if you like) has been using every mass shooting tragedy to reiterate what masculinity should mean to men. And, failing this, the hope is still that men will be confused as to what conventional expressions they can subjectively define it in, in a more female-correct way.

The Feminine-Correct Paradigm

Since the most recent school shooting in Florida, the focus on what constitutes masculinity has come to the forefront of our social consciousness. What exactly is masculinity they keep asking, and then provide definitions that only have meaning to a social order that’s founded on female social dominance. They are definitions that most men heard repeated constantly as boys from their overwhelmingly female-taught and feminine-primary educations. Since the beginning of the Sexual Revolution and the rise of Fempowerment boys and men are expected to grow up into a female-defined masculinity. Boys are acculturated in contexts that feminize them, yet we are meant to believe that all the horrors of Patriarchal masculinity are still being taught to them today:

Two decades ago, the psychologist William Pollack wrote that boys start out sensitive but through a “shame-hardening process” — told to stop crying, to be a man — they learn to hide what they really feel. And if they don’t know or understand their own feelings, how can they care about anyone else’s?

This has become something of a cliché. And the truth is, there’s no single culture of boys, but many. In my memories of adolescence, beneath the constant ribbing and occasional pyromania, we had tremendous affection for one another. And we longed to connect with women with an intensity that was difficult to contemplate.

This was a quote from Real Men Get Rejected Too. It’s a good illustration of the paradox masculinity presents to parents and educators. The idea that boys are these sensitive delicate souls who, through the evils of their Patriarchal (typically male) upbringing, are conditioned to become ‘macho’ violent men is a popular trope. After Nikolas Cruz killed 17 kids at school it was the go-to rationale. “Boys are brought up to be violent gun-loving beasts thanks to a perpetuated misogynistic culture of men” or some variation of this is common. It’s an easy, digestible, info-bite that sounds right because we’ve heard it for so long. If only boys we’re taught more like girls to get in touch with their emotions and were vulnerable in expressing them we could avoid these male-created tragedies.

That’s the pretense we’re supposed to believe – and it’s important that a larger society does believe in the inherent evilness of masculinity if the Feminine Imperative is to maintain social dominance. But the truth is boys have been systematically feminized for the past 3-4 generations. Boys are taught like defective girls. Since the 1970s it is increasingly women who have dominated academia from kindergarten to doctorate degrees. The entire western education system is founded on a feminine-primary, feminine-defined teaching methodology. In the process of advantaging girls to the utmost efficiency in school (to fempower adult women) the educational atmosphere had to be defined by what best served girls. School and teaching became ‘for girls’ and the educational landscape shifted to teaching styles that girls were most benefited in.

In that shift the idea that boys might be disadvantaged had little bearing, but overtime the conditions of teaching ‘to girls’ defined the teaching style as the correct style. In fact, teaching in a way that girls learn best, and disciplining boys for not learning this way, is no longer a style – it is just the way children are taught. Boys and men today are the product of female teachers who actively advantage girls at the expense of boys. So normalized is this teaching that boys disrupting the advantaging of girls in class is something we’ve decided needs to be medicinally curbed. Boys being boys is diagnosed as an illness and drugs are prescribed so as to sedate them long enough for the girls to learn.

This focus on empowering girls isn’t limited to the classroom. In every form of early childhood through adolescent media, music, social networks and social exchanges this theme is continued; girls have the future in their reach, boys are potential rapists and criminals if they don’t fall in line with female-correct way of how things just are. I get asked a lot about what I think defines Blue Pill conditioning and I’d say this ambient social theme of fempowerment is a strong basis for it. Boys are not taught this old-school, much-feared Patriarchal masculinity, they are bombarded with themes of how masculinity is incorrect, laughable, and a shameful ‘act’ that boys have to put on to cover the ‘real’ female-correct versions of their sensitive selves. Boys are taught from the earliest age that being a boy is an incorrect mask, while being a girl, learning like a girl, emoting and relating like a girl is ‘real’ and the correct way of developing a personality.

Boys are systematically taught to make women and womankind their Mental Point of Origin. This is why it is so difficult for men to unplug and abandon their old Blue Pill selves; feminine-primacy was literally conditioned into them since they were kids.

Nikolas Cruz, like many other teenage shooters is the product of this feminine-primary education system, not a Patriarchal “teach boys not to cry” machismo school. He is a monster of their creation; one taught to cry on demand and emote like a girl. He’s the result of a participation trophy mentality that demonize men and masculinity to the point that he never learns how to bounce back from defeat, rejection or simply life’s adversities. No men and no masculinity is available to teach that kid how to harden up and be resilient, or how that masculine discipline is not bullying or hazing, but a necessary part of a boy’s maturation into a masculine man.

But to throw society off the trail a false narrative of hyper-masculinity ruining our otherwise feminine-correct boys is perpetuated. When the next school shooting takes place the Village will again want the public to believe it’s masculinity and men’s fault for what is really his emotional outburst. The Village will attempt to place the responsibility on men, on fathers, while in the meantime perpetuating the idea that men/fathers are superfluous at best, a societal burden at worst. Men are useful catspaws in so many ways, and in perpetuating this narrative the Village reinforces the female-correct theme for grown men too.

One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.

For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.

Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.

It’s important to review this premise if we want to understand the real intent the Feminine Imperative has in redefining masculinity for men. Aspects of conventional masculinity are useful for women, and masculine duty (appeals to men’s “honor”) is a means to access it while avoiding the aspects that would in any way advantage men over women. Conventional masculinity is largely disparaged and parodied in order to disenfranchise men, but men are still needed to save women from natural disasters and protect them from physical harm (so long as they never expect sex for it). On some level of consciousness women understand the transactional and validational aspects of sex. They know that men’s serviceableness comes with an implied transactional cost, so to circumvent this women had to be put in charge of defining what masculinity should mean to men.

Masculinity as defined by men is almost always illegitimate and inauthentic in a feminine-primary world order. The presumption is that “macho man” ridiculous masculinity is a mask that men wear. That mask is meant to cover their true feminine-correct selves; because men cannot be authentic in any other context than the taught, feminine-correct context. So, of course, men can only be fakes or insecure of their masculinity (the masculinity defined by the feminine) and can never ‘really’ be that strong, dominant male apart from the permission the Feminine Imperative gives him.

Because the Feminine Imperative controls the overall context for what should be correct for men this has the effect of making women the sole deciders of what is masculine. In effect, and in this Blue Pill context, women become the gatekeepers of manhood. If masculinity imbues men with manhood (literally being considered a man) a ‘man’ is only whom a woman will designate as such within her presumed, feminine-correct context. In other words, do the imperative’s bidding and it dubs you a ‘man’.

Breaking the Cycle

As you might’ve guessed, this social dynamic conflicts with women’s Hypergamous imperatives. A Beta who thinks he’s a ‘man’ and presumes entitlements because of that is a woman’s worst fear. A Beta transgressing into a manhood that the imperative didn’t give him is the making for a guy being considered a sexual predator. However, an Alpha man, a man of high sexual market value still needs to accept the feminine-correct social frame, but he must also know his role within that frame. I’ve made the comparison in the past that women only see men as either draft animals or breeding stock. In a feminine-correct paradigm the breeding stock must know that his conventionally masculine aspects mean different things to a woman (Alpha Fucks sex) than the draft animal’s masculine aspects (Beta Bucks service). As such, masculinity and a designation of being a man becomes a constant qualifier for a Beta male. Manhood becomes a carrot he follows to pull the feminine-correct cart.

In fact, Beta men hold their female-correct ‘man’ designation as an unwitting point of pride. Examples abound of self-righteous Betas AMOGing other men for not being ‘real men’ (according to the imperative) like themselves. What they’re ignorant of is that this self-righteousness is defined by how well they conform to the masculinity that the imperative tells him is useful – and avoiding the ‘toxic’ masculinity it also defines for him – all according to his role in the scheme of a woman’s sexual strategy.

Should a man awaken from this Blue Pill conditioning and coronate himself as a ‘man’ outside the approval of womankind, this is when he’s ridiculed as an old school Patriarch and an anachronism of the old male-incorrect social paradigm. This is the control the imperative has against men stepping out side this female-controlled masculinity. The first response any female critic has for men who make themselves their mental point of origin is to remove that status of manhood.

Because they don’t accept feminine-primacy this disqualifies them from ‘real’ manhood.

One of the most difficult aspects men face in unplugging and living in Red Pill awareness is the social stigma that follows when they remove womankind from the pedestal and make themselves their mental point of origin. He gets called an asshole, he gets called selfish, he gets called a misogynist, but he’s also “less of a man” because he no longer conforms to the definition of masculinity that the Feminine Imperative has taught him from his earliest memories. Learning to redefine his mental image of what makes a man a man in his own Red Pill aware state is tough. Most of what he considered the very limited and controlled aspects of an ideal masculinity are a big part of the Blue Pill idealism he was raised on. This transition to conventional masculinity is also hampered by a deep learning of shame and gender loathing for finding anything positive in masculinity.

These are some important things to keep in mind if you are moving into a Red Pill awareness and learning to live in a new paradigm based around a conventional understanding of masculinity that isn’t inherently evil. It’s hard to do, but that old mental model of masculinity your teachers (all of them) convinced you was incorrect is something you must unlearn and cut yourself away from. Know that women don’t just long for that dominant masculinity, they needit for the health of their own life experiences. They need the protection, the comfort, the security and the discipline that masculinity balances their lives with.

Women ask, “where have all the ‘real’ men gone?”, but they exist outside the presumed, feminine-correct paradigm they mistakenly believe they have a secure control of. They don’t want to let go of that, so they will fight you to maintain a control over masculinity (which by definition can be chaotic as well as comforting) that they never really had – even with all the social engineering.

As was expected this week, there’s been an extensive and eager effort on the part our feminine-primary social order to once again further shifting the narrative of “toxic” masculinity to ‘masculinity istoxic. I addressed this in Male Control. Directly after the Las Vegas mass shooting we began to see articles from the femosphere decrying the evils of masculinity as being the cause of the violence.

It is no longer enough to foster the falsehood of varieties of masculinity as being “toxic” or “hyper”– now, any masculinity is a disease to society. The Feminine Imperative is all too ready to conflate any semblance of conventional masculinity with mass murder, rape, violence, harassment and any other social malaise that might viably be wiped off on men ‘being’ men. And in the wake of every new tragic act of violence this narrative shift will be more adamantly promoted by misandrist authors.

I covered a lot of this in Positive Masculinity and the Red Pill Parent series of essays, but even when I wrote these the cultural narrative was still promoting a distinction between what was acceptable masculinity and what was ‘toxic’ masculinity. This is what the Village has been instilling in our boys for some time now. Before the loss of Hillary Clinton and the Future is Female militancy took root there was some concession as to what might be considered an acceptable form of masculinity.

Naturally that ‘good’ masculinity was always defined as something uniquely benefitting the feminine. Before this cultural shift the Feminine Imperative still recognized the need it had for a masculinity that could be exploited for its purposes. There was still a need for men to Man Up and Shut Up. To be sure, boys were (and are) still taught by the Village as if they were defective girls. Boys had to be conditioned to hate their own gender in order to grow up into compliant and feminine-identifying men, but there was still a utility in masculinity that the Village recognized. Thus, there was a need to foster some kind of hopeful appreciation in men ‘being of service’ to women’s needs. There still needed to be a carrot for the mule to follow if men were to accept the old books social contract and that was the hope that their usefulness might ever be appreciated and rewarded.

The ‘Broken Boys’

Selling men on the old social contract while playing by the new set of rules worked for the Feminine Imperative throughout the late 80s, 90s and the early 2000s. However, what this narrative shift represents is a turning point in women acknowledging men as no longer (as) useful to their imperative. By 2012 it was the beginning of the End of Men, and there was little doubt, even back then, that we’d have the First Female President in office right after Obama’s exit. In the wake of that obsolescence the idea that masculinity was in any way beneficial to the Feminine Imperative, and maintaining the facade that masculinity in men might have some redeeming aspects, is no longer necessary. The feminine meta-frame has no reason to prompt men into believing their gender has anything ‘good’ to contribute to society. And thus we see the shift from qualified forms of ‘bad’ masculinity – toxic, hyper, Patriarchy, “culture of ____” – to the intended, non-qualified form of all masculinity being bad.

For the moment gyonocentrism must content itself to capitalize on human tragedies to emphasize its new masculinity = bad narrative. The Las Vegas shooting was the first paradigm shift in this respect. Once the obligatory, and now entirely boring, gun control sermons are published as a reason for the carnage, then the demonization of masculinity can be served up.

However, in the case of the most recent Nikolas Cruz shooting the Feminine Imperative gets a double bonus. The message is not only are men and masculinity the reason for all violence ever, but our boys are being taught to be these violent psychopaths because some outdated (and entirely mythical now) macho masculinity is making them so. Our boys, they say, are “broken”.

If you want to hurt a man, the first thing you do is attack his masculinity. Men don’t have the language to understand masculinity as anything other than some version of a caveman because no language exists.

Black is a perfect example of a Blue Pill conditioned ‘ally’ of the Feminine Imperative, but his sentiments here sum up exactly the tact that the femosphere has been using for a while now. There will always be a utility in appealing to the old male social contract as a horrible, chauvinistic, misogynistic, insensitive facade of what masculinity should be. It serves the imperative well if the Village can convince the larger populace that boys are still being taught by horrible masculine men and a society that hasn’t existed for 50 years which bully them into being potential Nikolas Cruzs.

They say boys are broken because it’s the only easy explanation that vaguely sounds right in the face of the Village systematically feminizing boys for the past four generation. Boys are “broken” because of an “outdated masculinity” that was replaced with a feminine-primary educational system decades ago. They’ll blame men for perpetuating that lie, and in the next breath blame men for not being “men” enough to engage with these young men so as to deter them from tragedies like this. The Village has been so effective in blurring conventional masculinity that its adherents themselves have no idea what masculinity entails.

When the 2018 Women’s March took place I, and a lot of other men in the sphere, noticed a common theme in the protest placards that mothers were creating for their sons. The message for girls was the standard “girls can do anything” pablum, but for boys the message was all the same:

“BOYS WILL BE BOYS GOOD HUMANS”

The message of today’s Village is that Boys are never to be boys, never to be male, never to be masculine in any positive aspect,…boys are born as not ‘good humans’. At least, boys are not good human beings until they acquiesce to the Village that is teaching them and to the authority of The Future is Female paradigm. In order to create the genderless, masculine-less, gelded men of the future they must get to boys earlier and earlier in their development.

In the interests of full disclosure I’ve had a handful of women defending this ubiquitous messaging tell me that it’s meant to teach boys not to blame their “shitty behavior on just their being male” – boys will be boys – but what even its defenders don’t recognize is the deeper message that boys of this age register; and particularly in an acculturation process that considers them defective girls.

But this is where we’re at in the intersexual environment today. To the imperative men are no longer men today, they are “allies”. This is the next logical step in Removing the Man from our social context. Boys are no longer ‘boys’, and they can only ever be ‘good humans’ so long as they continue their Blue Pill conditioning to become ‘allies’ later.

The following is a reblog of Josh Ishiro Finney’s A Letter to Boys & Young Men of America. Josh had this post and his blog attacked in the wake of the school shooting in Florida this week and I felt it was impactful enough to warrant a reblog here. Having written many a post on the war on conventional masculinity – and really the better part of my book Positive Masculinity – I wanted to extend my support for his commentary.

A response to mass shooting in Florida.

The bodies aren’t even cold yet and already you are being blamed.

Yes you.

All of you.

The boys and young men who will grow up to become one half of America’s future.
Once again, due to society’s failure to raise you, to teach you, to properly guide you on your path to manhood, your mere existence is being held responsible for seventeen more deaths—this time in Florida, and once again, at a school. The headlines of the last few days say it all:

“Toxic white masculinity: The killer that haunts American life” -Salon

“Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us” -The Boston Globe

“Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us” -Harpers Bazaar

“Don’t Blame Mental Illness for Mass Shootings; Blame Men” -Politico

In the handful of decades I’ve been alive, I’ve seen America shift from a culture of responsibility to one of blame. We don’t solve problems anymore. We cry, we pray for, we seek to find closure, and then finally, slaughter a sacrificial lamb for our sins. When I was young and Columbine happened, that lamb was Marilyn Manson and video games. Before that, it was D&D and Twisted Sister. These days, though, as body counts continue to rise and excuses continue to vanish, the lamb America has chosen to sacrifice is you. Rather than take responsibility for the seeds we’ve sown, the culture we built, and the disaster you’ve been left to inherit, we as a nation have chosen to lie to ourselves. To listen and believe those who claim that the answer is simple: “Boys are simply born bad.”

As an aging Gen Xer watching this tragedy unfold, I can’t help but look back at my youth and realize we were the dry run for this “crisis of masculinity” as the media likes to call it.

In my time I’ve watched as fathers were pushed out of the home, separated from their children, and their role in society debased and devalued. Like you, I was taught male behavior was bad behavior. That I was broken and needed to be fixed. Drugs, therapy, mass socialization were required to save me from my most innate instincts—

—the need compete.

—the drive to create.

—the urge to protect.

—the desire for female affection.

Like you, I was told these instincts were not only wrong, but dangerous. That due to my Original Sin of being born a boy, I was destined to mature into a lustful monster and an oppressor of women. All this was burned into me before I even reached college, where campus policy actually assumed all men to be rapists waiting to happen.

It isn’t hard to see how we got here, to an age when America is more than willing to sacrifice its boys. To quote Fight Club, “We’re a generation of men raised by women.” And the women who raised my generation had a saying: All men are pigs. But there’s another saying those same women were enamored with and that is: The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

So here we are, coming close to fifty years of single mothers raising their boys as if they were animals. Two generations of young men raised to believe they’re broken, immoral, and dangerous. That their natural state, if left unchecked and unmedicated, is a sexual ticking time bomb of rape and abuse. Half a century of academia peddling a grim version of history that holds your gender personally responsible for all the wrongs ever to have happened in the world. And a press, that at this very moment, is blaming YOU for every school shooting to have ever occurred.

After all this, how could there notbe a crisis of masculinity?

So to the boys and young men of America, believe me when I say it isn’t you who should be apologizing for the state of our world today. This mess was set in motion long before you were born.

You are not bad.

You are not broken.

You are not inherently evil or a sexual abuser in waiting.

You are boys who were robbed of your right to be men.

All your life you’ve been told to act, think, and behave like women. To suppress your passions, your pride, your need to compete and drive to achieve.

Now society is crumbling around us.

Feminizing boys didn’t make better men. It’s resulted in broken homes and shattered families and record suicide rates. It’s destroying any notion of a healthy partnership between men and women, and is pushing us ever closer to total collapse of gender relations.

Boys, we don’t need you to be like women, the world has plenty of women, already.

What the world needs now more than ever is for you to be men.

For you to grow-up, to grow strong, and do what men do.

For it is men’s strength and determination that tamed the wilderness, built civilization, and has kept the world fed despite all predictions we’d all die starving before the year 2000. It’s men’s curiosity that lead us to explore the oceans, to conquer space, and peer into the tiniest of microcosms of the human body. It was men who built the cities we inhabit, the luxuries we enjoy, the medicines that keep us alive. Men built the road, the plumbing, the electrical grid, the phone in your hand, the internet it’s connected to.

Men have always been innovators, explores, defenders, and leaders.

But most importantly, men have always been fathers.

So to the boys and young men of America, please read this and take every word to heart.

As a few of my readers know my daughter is presently a sophomore at college. Every time she reaches a new milestone in her life I have a tendency to mentally go back in time in my own life and consider how utterly different her experiences are in comparison to my own. At 19 the thought of being as organized and honestly well off as she is in life now would never have occurred to me. For a very brief moment in my life back then I’d kept a journal of what it was I was doing and thinking at the time. My first ‘real’ girlfriend had given me this blank journal (she was one of those girls who wrote diaries) to write my thoughts in and being the Beta I was then most of it was filled with my Blue Pill frustration with girls. She’d gifted me this journal, I found out later, as an effort to absolve her of all the guilt she knew was coming her way for having cheated on me and deciding that, at 18 herself, she wanted to move on into her Party Years without the baggage of a dutiful Beta who thought he was going to marry her.

This was 1988 and the then 19 year old Rollo Tomassi was very much a typical Blue Pill Beta. I sometimes read back through the dozen or so pages I actually took the time to write back then to remind myself how I thought back then. I was very much and idealistic Beta back then, but I had several other friends who subscribed to the same Blue Pill delusions; and now with hindsight I realize this phase in a Beta’s life is one that was around long before and long after I went through it. This was the ‘Break Phase’ I outline in Preventive Medicine.

As it turned out, the girl who I predictably developed ONEitis for, the first girl to spread her legs for me (‘enthusiastically’), the girl I thought had to be “quality” if she appreciated a guy like me, was every bit the ‘play the field’ skank I would’ve never called her because it was what a “typical male” would say about her. At one point I had thought I’d want to marry her. My Blue Pill conditioning had taught me it would be the right, “supportive” thing to do; marry her and support her ambitions and goals (it’s what good Blue Pill boys ought to do) at the sacrifice of my own. And as directionless as I was then, that was an easy decision to make.

My daughter recently informed me that her boyfriend’s best friend just proposed to his girlfriend at 19. Both this guy and his girlfriend are also sophomores at the same school and this is what triggered the reminiscing for me. At 49, and having lived the life I have and the experiences I use on this blog today, I’m very glad my first girlfriend dumped me. That’s hard to say sometimes, particularly when I think back on the pit of misery years I spent with the BPD girlfriend I’d gotten involved with later, but I’m thankful for those bad experiences as much as the good ones. So, it’s really difficult for me to tell my daughter’s friend “oh, congratulations”.

It’s very difficult for me to endorse anyone getting married at so early an age these days or when I was 19. Modern marriage is a menagerie of horrors for today’s men. People say, “Rollo you’re married, how come you’re so hard on marriage?” It’s either that or they presume my marriage is a shit show and I’m venting like a petulant boy. When I’m critical of marriage it’s in spite of my own (very happy for 21 years) marriage. But I cannot condone it for men today – not in its present state. Hardline MGTOWs and PUAs agree on one thing, if you ever consider marriage you’re Blue Pill. I’ve written in many prior posts that I don’t necessarily agree with that assessment, but I do understand it. The risks today far outweigh the rewards, but still there are men who, even with Red Pill awareness, will still take it on.

There’s a running debate I have going on with Hunter Drew (The Family Alpha) and Tanner Guzy (Masculine Style) about how marriage is a lifestyle decision, and depending on how informed a man is about the risks he assumes and when he decides to get married, this decision is literally a question of life or death for that guy. Both these guys married early in life, both have kids, and both will have far different experiences than myself in this respect. Both of them and myself have assumed the risks and sacrifices this entails. I’m fully aware that my wife can detonate the marriage at any time. I’m sure both Hunter and Tanner are well aware that their wives also have the right to have them removed from their home and take their children away from them for any reason. But we’re all married, and as I wrote in Surrender, we have all willingly put ourselves in the most vulnerable position a man can be in; we’ve bet our lives, livelihoods and the future health and happiness of our kids and families on what today is the ultimate suckers bet for a man. And what’s worse, we cannot ever expect women or our wives to ever relate with just how dangerous a position we willingly put ourselves in.

So I’m thinking about all of this after my daughter tells me about this 19 year old kid proposing to his girlfriend. Statistically his marriage will end before he’s 28. I would also bet that, like myself at 19, he’s making a decision that will affect him and his fiancé’s based on Blue Pill idealism – an idealism that’s informed by the Feminine Imperative and delusions of egalitarian equalism. Naturally I can’t possibly think this is a good idea. If I were this boy’s father I’d strongly advise against it, but there are others in the manosphere who would encourage this.

“Grown” Men

There’s an old saying that goes “marriage is our last, best chance for growing up”. I also disagree with this from the perspective of today’s version of marriage, but I understand how homey platitudes like this are appealing to a social order of men who it seems don’t want to grow up. It’s becoming a new way of AMOGing (particularly in religious circles); if you’ve got your shit together enough to see the wisdom in being married and starting a family you’re a “better man” than the ‘boys’ who they believe want to extend their adolescence. It’s really nothing new.

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

This is one half of strategic pluralism theory for men. Men who invest themselves in the long term aspect will always look for ways to validate their inability or unwillingness to pursue multiple partners. It’s easy to think that these men make their necessity a virtue, and that may or may not be the case, but what’s undeniable is that investing themselves in a one-mate strategy necessarily selects them out of experiences with women that would otherwise aid them in vetting a woman as a good long term prospect. The Blue Pill has always subjugated men to be predisposed to the one-mate investment strategy while simultaneously encouraging women to adopt a multiple mate strategy. That may seem counterintuitive, but when we look at the Sheryl Sandberg plan for Hypergamy we can see that what they believe is prudence is having a large selection of potential husbands from which to choose.

In Trad-Con manosphere thinking it seems like conventional wisdom to encourage men and women to marry younger. Look at where we’re at today; women forestall marriage – ostensibly to further a career, but really to falsely extend their Hypergamous decision making years – until their Epiphany Phase (29-31) or even beyond by freezing their eggs. Men take much more time to mature into their peak SMV potential, but what’s the common complaint? These men aren’t “being men” by preparing themselves for a life of family and marriage. They aren’t catering their lives’ decisions to fulfill women’s sexual strategy, and really what incentive do they have to when women are following the Sandbergian path of Hypergamy? Men and women marry later and later – if at all. Women unmarried by the time they’re 34-35 are likely to never marry in their lives.

Marrying Early

So it seems like wisdom to tell this kid, “good on you”, in spite of all the odds staked against him and despite the Blue Pill idealistic delusions that are prompting him to propose. Trad-Cons love the idea of a return to something resembling “traditional values” in order to save western culture from itself, but it’s important to remember that those old books values are really just leverage in a new books world.

Marrying early, as I said, is usually the result of Blue Pill naiveté. Both young men and women are still ignorant of who they are or who they have a potential to become. I see a lot of early-marrieds originating in religious circles because this is their only means to “legitimate” sex, but there are the guys who see marrying early a better way to ensure ‘permanent’ sex for themselves. In some respects it’s almost a blessing that women at this age are so anti-marriage – most young men on the investment side of strategic pluralism are far too willing to kill their own dreams to accommodate their investment.

Marriages that begin between 20-24 are almost 39% more likely to end in divorce. A lot of this, I speculate, is due to women feeling like they need to make up for missing out. The idealism of young Blue Pill men marrying early has one big obstacle and that’s the influence of Hypergamy on their wives. In Preventive Medicine I made the case that no matter the woman’s choices she makes or has made for her in life, it will not negate Hypergamy’s influence on her. Yes, that influence can be mitigated culturally (laughable in western societies) or personally, but it doesn’t remove the evolved influence. By the time that 20 year old mother and wife is 30, she’s had ten years to develop the resentment of her choice by living vicariously through her single girlfriends’ experiences. The context may change, but Hypergamy doesn’t.

Early marriage limits a man’s potential. Trad-Cons will fight me on this one, but the responsibilities of marriage and parenting will necessarily limit a man from opportunities he would otherwise have were he single. Aristotle said, “The Ideal age for marriage in men is 35. The Ideal age for marriage in women is 18”, not unlike my sexual market value graph, but the reason for this is because it takes much longer for a man to establish himself as a man. The simple truth is that part of the sacrifice of being married means a man will not be able to capitalize on opportunities he would have were he single. Some opportunities may never even be made available to him because of him being married. This isn’t something most early-marrying men consider.

Men who marry early and stick it out through their peak SMV years often feel the mid-life crisis (epiphany) years much more acutely. This is kind of the man’s making up for missing out resentment a wife may feel as she becomes more and more aware that she can’t compete in the SMP for a better Hypergamous prospect. I don’t believe men have a “crisis” per se around this time, but what they do experience is a sense of introspection that’s colored by their now better capacity to understand the game they’ve been a part of with regards to women. When a man’s married well this is less of an issue, but there is a definite remorse over the “life he could’ve lived” if only he’d known better. This is an assessment of the sacrifices he’s made, how they paid off (if at all) and a sort of survey of his life up to that point.

The biggest ‘con’ to early marriage is that it’s always going to be a learn as you go prospect while trying to establish a world that a his wife of the future will want to defer herself to. This worked far better in a culture and time when women would be compelled to defer to a man’s mastery due to religion, social norms and respect. We do not live in those day anymore and women have actionable ‘outs’ of any commitment that doesn’t suit them, while men have more responsibilities to qualify themselves to suit women.

Advantages?

Early marriage has a few advantages, but all of these depend on the personal nature of the woman a man marries. That sounds kind of obvious, but if you go into a marriage with a solid Frame and a woman who expects to defer to your dominance, I think young marrieds might have a better shot at long term success. If a woman is a virgin, yes, this can be a real source of attachment for her if her husband imprints on her as solidly dominant Alpha. I always advise men not to get involved with a virgin girl if his only plan is to spin her as a plate. There is far too significant and imprinting with virgin women and sex with an Alpha man, or even a guy who seemed Alpha. This is the recipe for an Alpha Widow, but in a marriage it can make for a strong bond.

As has been mentioned countless times, the most stable and healthy way to raise children is in a committed marriage. This might be the only advantage marriage may have for a man today. In an early marriage I would think that a woman being at her sexual market value peak, combined with following her true biological clock (her prime fertility window 22-26) the odds of having happy healthy children are improved. I have a cousin who spent more than half his life building himself into a millionaire architect, but at my age (49) his children are 5 and 7. I can’t imagine living this life now. I suppose money might make it easier, but evolutionarily speaking he and I should effectively be grandfathers by now. I married at 28 and there are advantages and disadvantages to this as well, but I cannot imagine having young children at my age.

Finally, for the “well, duh” moment, it goes without saying that a young wife/mother should necessarily be playing on your team. The only possible successful prospect for a younger marriage to have any stability is if that woman understands what it is she’s sacrificing. Women likewise sacrifice their own personal potentials and later this becomes their source of resentment. The stakes are high for men, particularly if they aren’t Red Pill aware, but women too must understand her own sacrifices; I think this is the most difficult thing. Women’s solipsism, Hypergamous nature and a social order that ‘fempowers’ them to believe not only can they “have it all” but are entitled to it all makes this the bridge too far for young marriage.

In the Trad-Con sphere today there is a constant droning for personal responsibility on the part of men. There is little to none about the responsibilities of women. We’re constantly told that women are only the way they are because men have allowed it. I’ve written before that this is a cop out and an absolving of women’s complicity that mirrors what the Feminine Imperative has put forth. Women are taught not to do anything “for a man” and anything a woman does that might be expressly for a man is is conflated with subservience. Consequently we get generations of women who only indulge their natural solipsism and expect men’s sacrifices as part of the utilities. This is one of the primary reasons all marriages fail; there is no complementarity. Marriage becomes nothing but a naked exchange of resources on the part of the man and anything a woman might do ‘for’ him is frowned upon. And don’t think this is just limited to those blue haired feminists, you can find it at your church.

Women can only willingly want to please a man whose Frame is the dominant one. You’ve got to have that world established that she wants to enter and become a complementary, supportive (of you) and willing participant in. This world-building takes time. Women evolved to seek competency in men. Hypergamy cannot afford to bet all of a woman’s genetic legacy on a guy who has “potential” – they want the proven commodity. This is one reason women look for men older and taller than they are. More importantly, you need a woman who is playing on your team, not against you. And sadly this is the state of marriage promoted by the Feminine Imperative today. Egalitarianism doesn’t promote complementary cooperation, it promotes an adversarial state of competition between husband and wife.

Last week I introduced a new concept in what most men can expect at some point in their lives. This is the idea of being Zeroed Out – basically men having most of a lifetime of status, financial equity, reputation, professional & educational growth, emotional investment and other metrics of men’s life equity being erased. I wanted to detail this a bit more here now as I think much of this concept gets easily misconstrued for men.

I think it ought to be part of any Red Pill aware man’s understanding that at many points in our lives we will be confronted with the prospects of having to rebuild ourselves. Failure, rejection and disappointment will happen for you, that’s just part of a man’s life, and it’s easy to rattle off platitudes about how many times you get back up being the measure of a man. But what I’m saying is there will be times when total reconstruction of your life will be a necessity.

You will be zeroed out at some point, and how you handle this is a much different situation than any temporary setback. This zeroing out is made all the more difficult when you confront the fact that what you believed to be so valuable, the equity you were told was what others would measure you by, was all part of your Blue Pill conditioning. At that point you need to understand that there is most definitely a hope for a better remake of yourself based on truths that were learned in the hardest way.

As I mentioned last week, it’s really easy to think of this as male victimhood or that a guy is complaining about his lot in life. Empathy, especially amongst men, has always been in short supply. I’ve learned the hard way never to bring up how sick I am, how bad my job is or how little sleep I got the night before in the company of 3 or more men – because I guarantee you that one has cancer, the other works in raw sewage and the last one’s an incurable insomniac. As men, our masculinity has classically been about how well we accept and adapt to adversity, so like I said, just mentioning a guy would be Zeroed Out at some stage in his life sounds like I’m saying “menz gots it so tough”. We’re supposed to take it on the chin and come back for more.

Guys will even get competitive with each other about how hard they’ve had it and how well they adapted to a bad situation. Others just don’t want to hear about another guy’s misfortunes, and others still will just say that men are living their lives wrong if a he bases his sense of self on the opinions of others – and women in particular.

The first two are simple to address. Men are in a general state of competition with each other even if this is only ever recognized as something going on in the social background. It doesn’t necessarily have to be vicious competition; even friendly rivalries are still rivalries.

It stands to reason that men will certainly be sympathetic with one another depending on circumstance, but that competitive nature is still something winners and losers instinctually understand. Out-group men will understand this state much more distinctly than in-group men (kin affiliation is an evolved survival adaptation), but even within that in-group there will still exist male dominance hierarchies. How those hierarchies are established is contextual to societal and environmental influences, but that they exist at all is often something our feminine-primary social order would like men to sweep under the carpet for themselves.

Qualifying Value

Competition is one thing, however, the idea that a man might base his life’s expectations, and his metric of success or failure, on external qualifiers is something I’d like to explore here. Social influences, family influences and men’s (often conditioned) subconscious understanding of how he can best effect intimacy and reproduction with women according to what he perceives are their expectations of him is a point of contention. If men feel Zeroed Out at various points in life, is that ‘zeroing’ just the effect of a man having built his personal integrity and equity on a foundation of Blue Pill sand?

MGTOWs are invited to correct me here, but as I understand it, this is a primary tenet of men going their own way – a rejection of women’s qualifying men’s personal worth based on their Hypergamous standards. I get that, but I would argue that there’s more to a man’s sense of self-worth than any qualifier womankind might place on him.

It’s no secret that Red Pill aware men need to understand the Game that they’re a part of and should indeed reestimate their personal worth based on this cutting away of oneself from their prior Blue Pill deceptions. This is why I believe every man who unplugs himself from his old ideals is, by order of degree, going his own way, but where he decides to go with it and how he decides to create value in himself according his new understanding is what’s at issue. Even in creating and building a new sense of self-worth there is still the potential of men becoming subject to losing that value irrespective of how he believes it should be measured.

I can imagine that whether or not a divorced man is ‘woke’ and living by his own terms, losing custody of and influence in the lives of his children can be something of a zeroing out for him. There are aspects of what we hold as our own personal worth that can be zeroed out no matter by what metric we think we should be evaluating it by. As I’ve always said, a woman should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it, but regardless, we still have intrinsic value that can be erased and it doesn’t alter the fact that women, family, career peers, etc. will be affected by it.

That said, it’s just an easy cop out to just say “Well, what you thought should be valued by others really isn’t, and because you thought it was, when you lose it you lose everything.”

III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority

Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.

This is the third commandment from Roissy’s 16 Commandments of Poon. It has relevance here because it’s illustrative of how a majority of men think about prioritizing what metric to build their personal equity on. As Red Pill aware men it’s too easy to get upset at plugged in men who are blind to some of the simplest Red Pill principles. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that most men are still Blue Pill and will fight you just for suggesting they might be wrong about the reality they find themselves in. They need that comfort even if they fail to see it will potentially be their undoing.

More importantly, we need to remember that the suicide rates I quoted in last week’s essay are based on men who built their own personal value on what their Blue Pill conditioning embedded into their psyches for a lifetime. That’s what we’re up against, and until more men come to unplugging this sad fact will continue. This is the gravity we’re faced with as Red Pill aware men trying to help other guys unplug. It’s not just about how a guy can get himself laid better; it might be about saving his life.

As I was saying in the last post, my brother in-law killed himself because he was convinced for a lifetime that by sacrificing every ambition and ‘doing the right thing’ he would be appreciated for it all. The Blue Pill quite literally killed him. He was convinced that he couldn’t live without his ONEitis of whom he’d made the “center of his existence”. Remove that center and he ceased to exist. Tragically though, his was only one story that mirrored countless more men’s. We live in a very dangerous age for men. The Blue Pill is even more of a liability today than it was in times past, because we live in an era that encourages men going all-in in their life’s investment in that conditioning.

Seeing that men build their sense of self-worth on this false ideology is obvious. And yes, we should make ourselves our own Mental Point of Origin, but more important is realizing that our lives depend on Killing the Beta and discarding the idealistic hope that our personal equity ought to be measured by a Blue Pill metric. One reason I take umbrage with Purple Pill hack ‘life coaches’ is because this is the dangerous value system they can never let go of and encourage other men to readopt.

Men will find themselves Zeroed Out at various stages of their lives, but if those guys are still mired in a belief set that the Blue Pill has convinced him is the only legitimate way of valuing himself he’s positioned to become another suicide statistic. And the real tragedy is that its this false evaluation that will lead most men to it – all the while he hears ‘atta boys’ and positivity thinking mantras from others who really don’t know what else to say.

Before I launch in here today I need to confess that this post has been in my drafts folder for a while now. As most of my readers are aware I’ve known two personal friends who’ve taken their own lives as a result of having their Blue Pill conditioned beliefs set them on a path to self destruction. One of the more important parts of my charter when I started writing was to reach the men who were at their wits’ end in figuring out how to deal with their personal, romantic or married lives that had until then been directed by what their Blue Pill acculturation and their understanding of intersexual dynamics were molded to be. Since I started and stopped and then restarted this topic again there have been a few recent developments in my perspective on men taking their own lives as a result of the Blue Pill’s influence on them.

All of this really began about two months ago while I was engaging in a debate (or what passes for debate) on Twitter with a very unsympathetic woman who thought she’d set me straight about why it is men choose to take their own lives at a far greater rate than women. As it stands today, men are statistically between 4 and 5 times more likely than women to kill themselves. For most Red Pill aware men this is a fairly well known stat and one that gets quoted often enough when women trot out their own stats about abuse or whatever issue they think it is that MRA are ‘confused’ about. They usually get owned when this sort of back and forth goes down, but I’m always drawn to the comparative issues women think are equitable to that of men losing their lives.

Men’s disposability is also nothing new to the manosphere. Sperm is cheap, eggs are scarce and men are expected to sacrifice their lives for the security and betterment of women even in the most patriarchal of prior social orders. It’s always interesting to me that issues of mandatory male conscription into the military (potential death) and the unignorable high male suicide rates are something women still won’t accept as being a pretty raw deal for men. Women’s innate solipsism will still compel women to find some “yeah, but;…” rationalization for men’s disposability. Whenever I bring something like this up the reflexive presumption is that I’m bemoaning men’s victim status for being disposable. However, it’s impossible to discuss male disposability without such a connotation. My issues isn’t one of seeking some equitable disposability for women, but rather it’s drawing attention to the way women react and rationalize away their own part in that disposability.

True Powerlessness

I covered a lot of this in Chivalry vs. Altruism, so I won’t belabor that here, but I will point out the inherent power imbalance in this disposability. I’ve stated in the past that true power is not the control we can exert over the lives of others, but rather the extent to which we have control over the direction of our own lives. When we discuss issues of power between men and women the real, ultimate, loss of that control is in the context of our deaths.

There is no greater powerlessness for men than a lack of control over our own disposability.

Again, this isn’t some cry of victimhood for men – I happen to believe there’s an evolved component in the male psychological firmware that actually predisposes us to sacrificing ourselves in lieu of the security of our women and children. That’s not so much altruism as it is an inborn subroutine for protecting women that triggers in life-threatening situations. When a mass shooter opens fire indiscriminately at a crowd of people it is the men, not the women, who instinctively put their bodies between that gun and women or children, even the one’s they don’t personally know.

In the bigger scope of things, men will always be more disposable than women, and on some level of consciousness women’s hindbrains instinctively understand this. As such, women’s conscious process must find ways to reconcile this understanding in order for them to move on from men’s sacrifices. Sometimes this can manifest in the War Brides phenomenon, but I would argue that in today’s social learning environment of mass media, instant gratification of women’ solipsism and feminine-primary social order, this reconciliation takes some even uglier turns. Today, women have become very efficient in consoling each other’s solipsistic rationalizing of men’s sacrifices. In this environment of default female victimization and presumed oppression even men’s ultimate sacrifice, men’s ultimate powerlessness in their own deaths, cannot ever be consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in a state of fempowerment.

While I had this debate it occurred to me that even men’s suicides could never be attributed to anything less than their own ‘male egos’ by women, thus making them victims of their conditioning into “toxic” masculinity. Essentially, women were arguing that men would put a noose around their necks because they were socially conditioned to do so. Their suicide rate was attributable to their self-pity and inability to be ‘real men’ as some nebulous toxic masculinity had predefined for them. I thought this was kind of ironic when you compare this reasoning to the narrative shift away from ‘toxic’ masculinity to masculinity itself is toxic. This is really a stupid argument when you consider that it’s just another social convention used to absolve women of the guilt associated with men’s sacrifices. Men are hardwired for self sacrifice, but likewise women had need to evolved psychological adaptations to help them clear the red from their life’s ledger in this respect.

So, in the end, it helps if women can fall back on social conventions that put the associated guilt of men’s sacrifices back on the men themselves. Chivalry and traditional masculinity are fine when they serve the Feminine Imperative, but if a man actually gets killed or kills himself as part of that, well, that’s on him then. And this is what I was beginning with in this debate; there will always be a desire for absolution of women’s guilt or complicity in the deaths of men. I should also add that in terms of war and men being drafted women regularly default to the same asinine presumption that if women were running the world that there would be no wars. I won’t dignify that with any deeper analysis than to say that this too is one more (feeble) way of looking for absolution in the sacrifices men make to facilitate women’s reality.

Suicide Solution

That still left the question, why do men take their own lives in such alarmingly high numbers compared to women? I had to do a bit of research on this, but the demographics for male suicide today show some patterns. 7 in 10 suicides are men (majority white) between the ages of 45 and 65. As expected from gynocentric media, the primary reason always cited is men’s so called stubbornness in seeking out psychiatric help before they attempt suicide – again absolving women’s influence of any complicity – but ignoring what would motivate men, and this demographic in particular, to suicide. Again, there’s no attempt to understand the underlying reasons for male suicide, only a stereotypically easy ‘male-stupid’ answer to absolve women’s complicity in it.

There’s a lot to consider and be sensitive of when it comes to male suicide, but I’m going to speculate about a few reasons here coming from a Red Pill perspective. At no other time in western history has there ever been a generation of more purposeless men. From an evolved psychological perspective, men need a function. We are innate idealists. We look outward at the world and like to imagine what could be possible. I believe there is also an innate part of our evolved mental firmware that predisposes us to problem solving and improvisation, and much of that comes as an adaptation to women’s own innate need for men who can display cues of competency.

In Competency I made the case for women’s attraction to men displaying signals of competency, confidence, mastery and creative intelligence as a selected-for survival adaptation. In short, our competency in life, whether stemming from physical prowess, social dominance or creative intelligence is integrally linked with our reproductive success as well as overall life success.

However, at no other time in history has men’s competency been so devalued and so debased; other than perhaps in terms of physical prowess and accommodating the short term (Alpha Fucks) breeding imperatives of women. At no other time in (western) history has the equity in what a man can provide or create or solve been so implicitly unnecessary or superfluous to women. When we consider the rates of college enrollment and graduation of women compared to that of men, when we consider the practical problems that men used to solve, our utility has never been less needed – or at least that’s the zeitgeist of today.

We read about how men need to accept this new social reality – that our need for purpose and function is no longer needed or as valued – and we need to change our headspace about it as if it were something men might simply turn off. This is the result of equalist beliefs that anything gender-specific is something learned rather than the innate firmware we were born with. But we cannot simply change our minds about needing a function. We evolved to be problem solvers, women talk, men do, but now we are expected to accept that men are obsolete.

Loss of Utility

In Relational Equity I made a case for men investing too much of their egos into what intrinsic (and extrinsic) value they believe their respective women ought to appreciate about themselves. Under the old books, old social contract this equity may have had some conditional value to women, but as a buffer against Hypergamy today there is very little a man might consider value-added equity (unless it’s exceedingly rare or exceedingly valued) as a hedge against Hypergamy. Before any defeatist critics tell me how not all women are like that, yes, I get it, there are a lot of variables to consider here, but the equation and the reality doesn’t change – relational equity, overall, is no insurance against Hypergamy. It is also no insurance against women’s security and providership needs being met by resources that come from outside that relationship. I’m not considering this because I’m trying to depress any man, but it is vitally necessary to consider when we look at reasons why 45-65 year old men are predisposed to higher rates of suicide and higher rates of alcoholism and opioid abuse.

I would argue that a major contributing factor to high male suicide rates finds its origins in men’s need for purpose, function and accomplishment during this phase of life. Every day I read an article about how men my own age are dropping out of social discourse. I mentioned a Boston Globe article about just this phenomenon in Male Control. In some respects I can understand that despite the unprecedented connectivity we enjoy today men really don’t seek out bonds with other men. This is primarily due to the fact that men need a common purpose in order to form these bonds. Again, this is just how we’re wired. Women intentionally schedule time to simply interact with their same-sex friends just for the sake of communicating and enjoying the act of communicating. Men need function or a common purpose to come together. We need an activity or a problem to solve and then we communicate and form bonds.

Women talk, men do. This is a well studied fact; our brains and, by extension, social networks largely center on purpose and function. Now, lets presume that in spite of having literally all the information in the world at our finger tips we remove all need for the utility that men are wired to provide to not just women, but the larger scope of Society. We get a generation of men on the outside looking in. Only the most creative, resourceful and motivated of men can really utilize, much less master, all that this information has to offer him. And even a portion of those men can really see past the antipathy of their supposed obsolescence to do something truly meaningful or masterful. As the saying goes, most men live lives of quiet desperation, but in the modern era these men are demonstrably useless. And I mean that in a functional sense; once a Beta man has been wrung of his utility to women, he ceases to be able to convince his hindbrain that he can build, improvise or solve things.

Once a man is stripped of his usefulness, once it’s made clear that all of the equity he believed would support his relationship has been erased after so long, men will still resort to practical, deductive solutions. That solution may be suicide when weighed with the prospect of having to rebuild himself in a new context; and even if he did would he just be building a new ‘him’ based on his old belief set?

When my brother in-law committed suicide it seemed to me at the time to be the most logical end he would come to. He was a man very steeped in Blue Pill ideals, but he was also a man who prided himself on what he could do – and if he didn’t know how to do something he was always a fast learner. He literally built his life, and expectations of a future life, around the relational equity he believed defined him as a man. He was very invested in the old books, old social contract that rooted a man’s attractiveness and quality in what it was he could do. What he built for himself and his wife defined his identity.

All of that 20+ years of building equity and an identity based on it was erased for him in the space of about six months. But it was more than the 20 years he’d been saving, building, solving and refining, it was a perceived future he believed would be lived out for the rest of his life that got erased.

To me, at that time, his suicide made absolutely perfect sense from a male-deductive logic perspective. What didn’t make sense was all of the endless rationalizations I heard from his family, friends, his kids, his Ex (my now widowed sister in-law) about why they thought he went through with it when it was plain for anyone who wanted to confront the truth to see. A lot of these rationales were almost verbatim the same that the article I linked used. “If only men would reach out when they have suicidal thoughts”, any and every rationale that might absolve his Ex of the guilt, and still more that were meant to console her (he must’ve been mental ill) though in the end she really didn’t need it.

My brother in-law made a practical decision not an emotional one, and while I wouldn’t presume to say that a guy’s emotional state isn’t very influential in his suicide, how he comes to the decision is very much attributable to men’s deductive nature. He showed no outward signs of emotional distress. In fact, right up to his hanging himself he was in very good spirits and seemingly accepting of the fact that the wife he lived his life for was going to be leaving him soon. He was very matter of fact in a way that men are when they’ve resolved something for themselves. When a guy seems to be taking things in stride we don’t want to create a problem where we see none.

When we look in this context at the high rate of male suicide in this age demographic we begin to see how men come to this decision. Everything they’ve built up to 45-65 years of age is now debased, devalued or simply erased. All of the value and equity they’ve committed their lives to – doing the right thing according to their Blue Pill conditioning – is as if it never mattered. So they’re confronted with a choice, rebuild themselves (hopefully in a new Red Pill aware paradigm), reconstruct a new life and tough it out, or, simply, pragmatically erase themselves.

Personally, I’ve had at least two occasions where I’ve been confronted with rebuilding myself. It’s a tough prospect, make no mistake, especially when you’re Red Pill aware and understand the reality behind having to rebuild a life from scratch after so much investment in plans and projects you truly believed in when you made them. My father had to confront this rebuilding too at around 55 years of age, but rather than rebuild or kill himself I watched him slowly decay into a man I never knew could exist as my dad.

Zeroed Out

I apologize if this topic is a bit of a downer, but I think it ought to be part of any Red Pill aware man’s understanding that at many points in our lives we will be confronted with the prospects of having to rebuild ourselves. Failure, rejection and disappointment will happen for you, that’s just part of a man’s life, and it’s easy to rattle off platitudes about how many times you get back up being the measure of a man. But what I’m saying is there will be times when total reconstruction of your life will be a necessity.

You will be zeroed out at some point, and how you handle this is a much different situation than any temporary setback. This zeroing out is made all the more difficult when you confront the fact that what you believed to be so valuable, the equity you were told was what others would measure you by, was all part of your Blue Pill conditioning. At that point you need to understand that there is most definitely a hope for a better remake of yourself based on truths that were learned in the hardest way.

To end this I’m going to quote the comment of a man I met when I spoke at the 21 Convention in September. I won’t use his name, but after we talked he confessed that he was the commenter here. He’d made the trip to the convention to meet me face to face, to thank me for my work and gave me permission to use his example in a post. I won’t quote it entirely, but you can read the whole thing here. His situation is an example of, and inspiration for, everything I’ve illuminated in this essay

After a long marriage I divorced the mother of my children. A couple of years later, after some casual dating, I met a woman I would come to describe as my soulmate. I got married young – but this time, with all my infinite wisdom gained over the years – I was finally wise enough to pick a woman I was super compatible with.

We were together for a few years and even lived together. Things started out great and it was mostly smooth sailing until we moved in together – at which time I slowly allowed myself to be betaized in a slow motion, excruciating painful way.

About a month after breaking up with her I fully planned to commit suicide. I wrote a long letter explaining my rationalization and took other affirmative steps towards going through with it. About a week after I wrote the note – with D(eath) Day fast approaching – I took a break from getting my affairs in order to surf the net. I stumbled upon an Ask Reddit thread that was bad mouthing various subreddits. Some feminazi or male feminist mentioned the Red Pill subreddit as an example of a subreddit filled with craziness, and I decided to check what all of the fuss was about. Now

I’m not a religious man, but I will never rule out divine intervention. The timing of finding TRP – by complete coincidence no less – couldn’t have been more fortuitous. I stayed up all night reading the side bar – Rollo’s essays having the deepest effect on me – and everything…just…clicked….Talk about connecting the dots! Wow! It was very much like a come to Jesus moment. It was like divinity revealed secret knowledge to me just when I needed it the most – knowledge that gave me hope and very well may have saved my life. This all went down not really that long ago in actual time – but from where I metaphorically stand now it seems like an eternity.

Stay strong my friends, you can rebuild yourself even in the face of being zeroed out.

One of the most pressing imperatives human males (really most primates) have evolved is a need for certainty in their own paternity. Up until the last century with the advent of DNA testing it has been an imperative that has really been at the control of any female with whom a man copulates with. Indeed, even today a ‘father’ is really whomever’s name a woman puts on a birth certificate, generally no questions asked (and no information relayed) of that mother by the OBGYN doctors. Prior to the Sexual Revolution and the millennia leading up to it social and religious controls were instituted to keep rampant Hypergamy in check. An argument could be made that, even in a post-agrarian social order, ubiquitous monogamy and marriage were socially mandated as a way to not only control for women’s Hypergamous impulses, but were also the only practical means of control over certifying that a man’s child was of his own genetic line. And even this had its flaws.

Up until the advent of genetic testing the only practical, somewhat assured failsafe for knowing paternity was long term, pair-bonded monogamy and the social conventions that were instituted around it. Men’s sexual strategy (our masculine imperative) is scattershot. Our biology functions such that we can father countless children with each ejaculation and continue to do so well into our later years of life. This strategy is a counterbalance to women’s quality-over-quantity approach to their own sexual strategy. For each environmental obstacle one sex’s reproductive imperatives poses, the other will evolve contingent strategies to compensate for it.

To understand this conflict all we need to consider is the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies – For one sex’s strategy to be fulfilled the other’s must be compromised or abandoned.

For men, in a social order founded on monogamous pair-bonding, this means abandoning his scattershot sexual strategy and adopting the strategic goals of women’s strategy. What were looking at here for men is exactly the type of evolved contingent strategy I mention above – abandoning his sexual imperative to essentially bet his genetic legacy on one horse, rather than diversifying his odds with, potentially, many sexual opportunities. This is a very important distinction for Red Pill aware men to make with regards to their own sex; opting in for long-term monogamy over a man’s evolved sexual strategy (scattershot) represents adopting a woman’s (ultimate) sexual strategy as his own. This dynamic is defined by what’s called strategic pluralism theory:

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.

If we consider that men are overwhelmingly (80%+) rated as unattractive by women today we begin to see the adaptive logic of strategic pluralism for men. Less opportunity equals less potential to follow a man’s sexual imperative. Solution: invest all your sperm and all your efforts into one long-term bet; reproduction with one or relatively few sexual partners – and if you can build social and moral conventions around this adaptive strategy to reinforce it, so much the better.

If men can compel intrasexually competing men, and women (whose strategy might be compromised by adopting it), to believe that monogamy is a social and moral imperative, then they increase the odds that they’ll successfully circumvent what would otherwise be the natural limitations of their own reproduction.

As you can probably guess, this adaptation for singular parental investment imposed a much higher premium on men’s need for certainty of their own paternity. To be sure, the Alpha Males of most primates have a habit of killing the offspring of any prior Alpha that had access to fertile females in a group prior to his own breeding with them. This infanticide is yet another adaptive insurance that a male primate can be certain that any resources, protection and parental investment he put into any progeny would be of his own paternal line. If it can be assumed that the importance of paternity is a primary, evolved drive in primates, how much more imperative must it be for human males adopting a sexual strategy of singular investment? How much more imperative must it be for women to collectively confuse paternity within a social collective (tribe) and protect against a perceived threat of infanticide or loss of resource provisioning if left on their own?

Even in our march towards ‘civilization’ we find this anti-paternity bias in the killing of male members of a social collective while preserving fertile females for potential breeding purposes. Today we may not be killing the sons of rival clansmen, but we can certainly see the paternity bias in how we regard kin affiliation above out-group affiliation in our personal dealings. Concerns of paternity, for men, evolved to be part of our mental firmware – and certainty of it became of paramount importance.

Strategic pluralism, however, is not without its own counter contingencies. Even within a social and moral environment that restricts Hypergamy, women are still psychologically compelled to optimize their own sexual strategy to its fullest. 8,000 years ago 17 women reproduced for every 1 man – and this was after the advent of agriculture. There’ve been other studies that reduce this number to a 5 to 1 ratio, but still the fact remains that even in a social order that (ostensibly) prioritizes pair-bonded monogamy, women have provably found ways to optimize Hypergamy and confuse paternity to a socially stable degree. Thus, we see counter-adaptations in behavior on the part of men to mate guard, to once again, insure certainty of paternity. Even in the relative stability of monogamy, men’s psychological imperative for paternity supersedes the social environment.

Cuckoldry by Any Other Name

As I’ve mentioned in prior essays, cuckoldry deserves a much broader definition today; one that goes beyond the obvious duplicity of birth fraud. Women have found that by tweaking the social conventions that would limit their own sexual strategy they can circumvent the monogamous side of sexual pluralism socially enforced by men. Thus, we get new feminine-primary social conventions that celebrate, socially reward and positively reinforce men’s acceptance of the parental investment responsibilities of other men who fathered children with a woman they’ve pair-bonded with. Step-dads get the big thumbs up and we rejigger the positive reinforcement to downplay father’s day and replace it with special person’s day.

Now, consider this with respect to the potential for infanticide that a woman’s hindbrain believes men are capable of. That fear of infanticide represents a root-level limbic part of women’s evolved need to optimize Hypergamy and the great potential for loss of having optimized it in her offspring. So imperative is this to the female psyche that it became necessary to socially condition men’s evolved paternity need out of them once women and the Feminine Imperative became the dominant social driver.

On a larger social scale, one that is defined by a post-Sexual Revolution, feminine-primary social order, the answer is simple and total; men must be convinced to completely abandon their biological imperative of parental certainty before they commit to a monogamous relationship with a woman. Socially, we make paper heroes of men who will accept the parental investment responsibilities of a child he didn’t sire. That ‘heroism’ of the guy who accepts his assigned role as a retroactive cuckold is short-lived, but the archetype of that guy who ‘man’s up’ and adopts the children of a single mother is now embedded into our modern folklore.

I would also argue that a large part of the Blue Pill conditioning of men for the past 5 generations can find its roots in women’s need to optimize Hypergamy while ensuring the security that once she does a provider-male will step in to fulfill his role as a dutiful cuckold. In order to achieve this, free from the fear of infanticide, boys and men must be conditioned to unequivocally revoke any need for certainty of their own paternity.

A few years ago I outlined the next step in Open Hypergamy would be transitioning to a state of normalized and accepted Open Cuckoldry. Wrapped into this transition is also the social efforts to normalize a feminine-controlled form of polyamory – one in which primarily a woman is presented with the options and control of exercising both the short-term sexual, and long-term provisional, sides of Hypergamy. Today this is what’s termed a polyamorous relationship with male partners representing Alpha seed and Beta need. In moving from a normalized state of Open Hypergamy to Open Cuckoldry there are a series of social changes that need to occur and find acceptance in the general population of men. One of these changes is a large scale, socialized effort to get men to accept that their biological imperative to ascertain paternity – even the questioning of paternity – be equated with “toxic” masculinity.

The War on Paternity

Increasingly we are seeing a push on the part of the Feminine Imperative to delegitimize the innate need of men to ensure their paternity. It’s actually an aspect of a war that’s been going on since the Sexual Revolution to redefine masculinity and fatherhood. As I mentioned in Positive Masculinity the definition of what makes a father is becoming more and more ambiguous, while fathers become increasingly more superfluous. In order to complete this delegitimization of masculinity men must be convinced that their innate need to know paternity, and the importance they inherently place on it, is something to be ashamed of.

Every social mandate we see today puts the interests of the mother and child well above that of any father. This is why paternity is rarely ever a factor in issues of child support; even for children that a man didn’t father but is held legally liable for. Socially, even religiously, any importance of paternity for men is being systematically erased. From doctors being gagged from informing cuckolded fathers of genetic tests, to limiting their access to DNA tests themselves, to encouraging men to ‘man up’ and marry single mothers as a moral imperative, paternity for men is now some sort of shameful insecurity.

Why would the Feminine Imperative seek to root out what has been a fundamental, evolved, part of men’s mental firmware since the time of our hunter/gatherer beginnings? Because Hypergamy needs security. Hypergamy needs assurances to quell the doubt that a woman has optimized both the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks aspects of her sexual strategy. I would argue that men’s psychological need for certainties in his paternity is on par with the need women have of certainties in their need for optimizing Hypergamy.

All this war on paternity amounts to is an ensuring that women’s unquestioned, unilateral control over Hypergamy is baked into men on a societal level. Convincing men to abandon any claims on certainty of paternity, and at the same time shaming men who put any importance on it, is an effort on the part of the Feminine Imperative to get men to surrender their sexual strategy by abandoning it wholesale, while praising them for playing a willing role in fulfilling women’s sexual (and life) strategy. Even when that sexual strategy is one where a man acknowledges his lesser sexual market value and seeks to put all his investment into one woman, the push to delegitimize men’s need for paternity circumvents this strategy.

Delegitimizing men’s need for paternity cancels any and every upside that long-term monogamy had for Beta men using this sexual strategy. Thus, a return to a scattershot, some would say ‘less civilized’ sexual strategy becomes the only obvious alternative for men who want parental certainty.

Erasing the importance of paternity for men is literally the last nail in the coffin that is now contemporary marriage. It reduces men to little more than draft animals and livestock for women’s breeding purposes by erasing any claim a man may have to know his children are his own. Most well-conditioned Blue Pill men adopt this archetype unquestioningly. There are no ‘Fathers’ anymore; all men are interchangeably either breeding stock or simply childcare workers in this new social framework. And boys and young men’s pre-acceptance of this state of men is part of their Blue Pill conditioning.

To fully effect Open Cuckoldry the goal of the Feminine Imperative is to have men define masculinity as accepting parental investment as separate and apart from evolved concerns of paternity.

Back in October, 2016 I wrote an essay called Sexual Zoning. In that post I explored the social inconsistencies and potential for (sometimes catastrophic) consequences for men in misunderstanding what were, and what have become, particular zones in which men and women covertly acknowledge the potential for an intersexual connection.

In the bygone Western social system, young people were expected to regularly interact with one another in controlled, regulated environments, in a way that fostered productive, long-term, monogamous, assortative relationships. This was a sort of “holistic” milieu, so to speak, where young people treated one another as potential future partners, sexual and otherwise, in a socially regulated manner, in all cases when they were permitted to interact. This was even the norm in workplaces where both men and women were present. The average man found a girlfriend through his extended family or social circle, because families and social circles were normally large.

What we have today is the complete opposite: “sexual zoning”. Some mixed-sex environments, like the workplace, schools and campuses, are made completely asexual – sterile, so to speak. No sexualized interactions are permitted to take place. This is demanded by law and expected by society. In such environments, you’re supposed to treat members of the opposite sex strictly as colleagues or professionals, non-sexual beings. (Hot men are allowed to get away with more, of course, but that’s another issue.) Other mixed-sex environments, on the other hand, like nightclubs, are expected to be full-on sexual. Everybody there knows that all interactions entail the future possibility of casual sex. It’s basically a meat market. You’re expected to hit on girls, and girls expect to be hit on by attractive men. Socializing in these environments requires action, engagement. If you want to find a partner, either just for sex or something more, you have to go there, you have to have Game etc.

The video I’ve chosen to dissect here is a prime example of how generations of men have been raised to deliberately misunderstand intersexual dynamics and at the same time demonize the conventional masculinity that so much of western culture has been founded upon. To be thorough though, really every culture throughout history has been primarily founded on conventional masculinity and the aspects that contribute to maleness.

Jonathan McIntosh finds an easy mark in the archetypal masculine characters of Harrison Ford, but there’s a very important reason the 80’s icon is so egregious to the men of McIntosh’s generation. Han Solo, Indiana Jones, etc. are all the Alpha male rogues this generation has been taught to love in terms of bravado, but to hate because they ‘always get the girl’; and they get her in such a way that it grates against all that their feminine-primary upbringing led them to believe was just this side of sexual assault.

McIntosh relates that he was part of a generation that idealized Harrison Ford’s most iconic characters, yet now he feels pangs of regret and resentment for having looked up the characters’ archetype. This is a perfect illustration of how conventional masculinity has been reverse engineered by our feminine-primary social order since the Sexual Revolution. I’ve mentioned in many prior essays that while overt masculinity is vilified as the cause of all social evils, it still remains the most arousing aspect of men for women. Boys like McIntosh saw this archetype and made that connection to female attraction, but it took generations of Blue Pill reconditioning to make them feel bad for ever attempting to adopt that bravado into their own personalities.

While growing up the message was the same Blue Pill identifying with the feminine (in fact Beta Game depends on that identification). Play nice, play equal, respect all women by default and never assert yourself too overtly or too crudely lest you risk offending her sensibilities. These are the boys who were raised by family, media and their schooling to expect a rationality that women could be expected to say what they mean and then do what they said. Yet that never seemed to gel when they would deductively see the girls they wanted, the ones who told them they wanted a ‘nice guy’ who respected them, consistently reward the asshole jerk with the intimacy and sex they thought would come to them if they followed what they were told.

In the end, Han Solo and Indiana Jones get the girl and she genuinely desires him – not because this is some odd fantasy of the writer’s imagination, but because this is (was) a standard aspect of women’s genuine attraction to men. The aberration is the idea that the attraction and affair would go any other way. Only in this feminized generation does thousands of years of male-female interaction seem at all unsettling.

So, here we have conventionally masculine archetypes – sometimes rakish, sometimes bold and dutiful – following their own path, making themselves their Mental Point of Origin, and making their mission (not their woman) their priority. Whether it was Captain Kirk, Han Solo or Conan the Barbarian the mental order was always firmly focused on the individual man and his action. Between the time of the Sexual Revolution and 2017, the Feminine Imperative has systematically erased the conventionally masculine archetype; so much so that the gender-loathing men of this generation are either appalled at displays of masculinity or they simply have no frame of reference with which to contrast it with the distorted and blurred ideas of what masculinity should mean to them.

As a result of these four to five generations of progressively more feminized men we now see the confusion and disgust at conventional masculinity coming from this generation of men. We see a generation of males who have no positive association with their own gender. They become increasingly more isolated because they are convinced that anything that might be gender-exclusive to men alone is, by default, a form of misogyny. There is nothing ‘positive’ about being a man, yet for all of the misconceptions about gender being social constructs, exclusively female organizing of women and fempowerment is still viewed as beneficial; a sign of society ‘evolving’.

I recently read an article in the Boston Globe about middle aged men’s increasing social isolation. I would argue that for all of the raising of awareness about this phenomenon it is primarily generations of men’s inability to interact with other men that is at the root of this isolation. For decades now men have been discouraged from meeting with other men in any formalized fashion. Men are either suspect of misogyny or homosexuality if they get together for the sake of being men. What were seeing now is generations of men who no longer understand how to socially interact with other men.

Furthermore, when this isolation becomes a concern of women, those men are again berated for not interacting with other men in the ways that women do. Women talk, men do, but a feminine-primary social order only approves of one way for men to associate with one another – in the way that women do. Thus, we see the confusion of women that men don’t call each other up to schedule a coffee date for the express reason of conversation. Men and women have different forms of communication, but the socially approved form is only ever from the feminine context. Men interacting “as men do” – in a conventionally masculine way – is always misogynistic. Thus, we see overseers in the locker room, if only symbolically, to regulate what and how men communicate with each other.

The End of Toxic Masculinity

Dalrock had a great quick-hit post recently about how Michael Moore was suggesting that men be required by law to seek their wife or long-term girlfriend’s (or most recent Ex) signed permission to purchase a firearm in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Vegas.

That this idea would ever be a serious consideration speaks volumes about how masculine gender-loathing has become endemic in western culture. I get that Michael Moore is a self-inflicted cuck, but all I’m seeing in the wake of the Vegas shooting is less about gun control and more about male control.

It’s no longer about categorizing masculinity as “toxic” or “hyper” – that narrative is officially dropped after this shooting. Now, any masculinity is a threat, any expression of conventional masculinity is the true problem. Suggesting that a woman’s oversight and discernment should be necessary for a man to have access to a civil right only further reinforces what I’ve been saying for some time now – only the feminine is ‘correct’ in any social discourse. Only the feminine is legitimate in exercising judgement, educating new generations and deciding which man will breed and which will not.

Think about this; what’s being suggested is that men be denied a civil right that apparently only women should legitimately have. For all the fallacious blathering of women in pink pussy hats about how they think they’re losing rights today, here we have an actual right of men being denied by women, by the Feminine Imperative.

The ‘toxic’ masculinity narrative made a qualitative distinction between a feminine-acceptable form of masculinity and a potentially dangerous form. Needless to say the accepted form always consisted of whatever aspects of masculinity that was immediately beneficial to womankind. ‘Toxic’ masculinity was always characterized as Man Up or Shut Up masculinity:

Man Up or Shut Up – The Male Catch 22

One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.

For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.

Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.

Now, in the Feminine Imperative’s unceasing efforts to Remove the Man a distinction between a useful masculinity and a dangerous masculinity is no longer something that resonates. All masculinity, all aspects, beneficial or detrimental, are to be considered the problem:

That the problem might just be masculinity, plain and simple, is not something we’re eager to countenance. While we might be prepared to apply a little structural analysis to the situation – yes, there is something about men and the way they are conditioned that leads us to this place – we’re unwilling to draw any final conclusions. Masculinity doesn’t kill people; it’s those mysterious toxins that are to blame.

[…]But strip away the so-called toxic aspects of masculinity: the aggression, the violence, the hate, the guns, and what are you left with? Strength, endurance, a woody-scented perfume, a liking for the colour blue? Certainly nothing that need be associated with manhood or maleness. These are simply individual qualities. The only reason to code them as “masculine” is to preserve a social hierarchy that ought to be destroyed.

[…]What would be so terrible about a world in which boys were treated no differently to girls from the day they were born? In which there are no pink/blue codifications to hide behind? In which a man’s anger and aggression were considered every bit as aberrant and unnatural as a woman’s?

The problem we’re facing isn’t toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic. It’s time we questioned even its most subtle manifestations.

Going forward this will be the narrative. There will be no distinction between misogyny, masculinity and maleness. What this author, perhaps deliberately, doesn’t want to address is that masculinity and all the associated ways our thinking and our behaviors that manifest from the biological side of our nature aren’t something that can be dissociated from us without killing us or erasing what we were evolved to be. There are no truly positive or negative aspects of masculinity, just as there are no positive or negative aspects of Hypergamy. They just are, and what makes them beneficial or detrimental all depends on the context in which they are applied. That may seem strange coming from the author of a book titled Positive Masculinity but understand that what is positive about masculinity is made so by need and by circumstance.

In a world created in the image of the Feminine Imperative masculinity itself is a horrible evil, until it’s needed to save women from rising floodwaters.

You see, for as much as the imperative would like to remove the ‘man’ from our language, our cultural consciousness, that man will always be needed in spite of the hate directed towards masculinity. This is what a feminine-primary society would have us redefine as some other term, something not unique to a male human being. But conventional, evolved, masculine strength and purpose will always manifest in men who unapologetically embrace it without an afterthought.

In my interview with Craig James we discussed men’s higher order thinking and purpose as well as our vital animal nature. You don’t separate one from the other. This is what the Feminine Imperative would have from men; a unilaterally female controlled utility-based masculinity that saves them from the worst consequences of both their environments and their decisions and simultaneously disappears when inconvenient. We hear women bleating about a lack of Real Men and the disappearance of true grit, and in the next article linked we see efforts to erase men entirely from social influence.

As I told Craig, when I’m in the squat rack I’m glad I have a feral, animal nature. It’s a survival aspect of human evolution. I’m not suggesting with this essay that men will become extinct; on the contrary I think what will help define our new conventional masculinity will largely be determined by how we express it in spite of a world arrayed against Man-kind. An equalist culture based on blank-slate equalism doesn’t see that you don’t separate the animal side of the human being from the high-order side. It is unwilling to accept that we need both; that we benefit and sometimes suffer from both.